The Caravaners: 10 (Handheld Comic Classics, 1)

A devastating and hilarious comedy about an Edwardian caravan holiday in Kent

In the early years of the twentieth century, Baron Otto von Ottringel, a pompous and self-important major in the German army, is about to take a holiday abroad with his long-suffering second wife. His narrative of pained bewilderment at the bizarre behavior of the English people with whom he has chosen to spend a month in a convoy of horse-drawn holiday caravans is side-splittingly funny. We sympathize deeply with the lady whom he pursues in a platonic and very one-sided holiday affair, and even more with Baroness Edelgard, who discovers her own holiday freedoms, and becomes newly emancipated in her marriage, to the Baron’s horror. 

Reflecting frustration with and exasperated affection for German aristocratic society, The Caravaners reveals the lost world of European social networks and crusted assumptions that disappeared forever with the First World War.

Elizabeth von Arnim (1866-1941) was born Mary Annette Beauchamp, and was an Australian-born British novelist. She married a German aristocrat and her best-known works are set in Germany. After her first husband's death, she had a three-year affair with the writer H. G. Wells, then later married Frank Russell, elder brother of the Nobel prize-winning writer and philosopher Bertrand Russell. She was a cousin of the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield. Her first marriage made her Countess von Arnim-Schlagenthin and her second Elizabeth, Countess Russell. Though known in early life as May, publication of her first book introduced her to readers as Elizabeth, which she eventually became to her friends and finally even to her family. She is now known invariably as Elizabeth von Arnim. She lived in Nassenheide, Prussia, in London and in Switzerland. She died in the USA in 1941 while visiting her married daughter.

Juliane Römhild is a lecturer at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, and researches British and German interwar literature. She is particularly interested in women’s writing, middlebrow novels and representations of happiness in fiction. She is a founding member of the Elizabeth von Arnim Society. Her monograph Authorship & Femininity in the Novels of Elizabeth von Arnim (Fairleigh Dickinson UP) was published in 2014.